That's the way it goes. We're mostly adult males who are going to be driven by competition to get faster, spend more money and be more competitive. The series will bring in new teams. People routinely complain about other teams spending money, bringing big rigs, using aero devices, installing stand alones, running "tubular sub frames", etc.. If those teams are doing it within the rules, then what's the problem? I see plenty of teams that use cubic knowledge and skill in place of cubic inches or cubic dollars who are very competitive. Conversely, I see plenty of teams spending tons of money and spectating at the trophy presentation.
If you want to start capping costs and asking people to show receipts, you're going to get teams who will leave and go race in WRL or AER. Without consulting with my teammates, I'm pretty comfortable saying we would be one of them.
Pick your poison.

I don't see why the cost of the build is relevant. As has been pointed out, the limitation is points, not money. Nobody is building "tube frame cars", nor will they make it through tech. Section 3.2.17 already addresses this via the "maximum value free" roll cage.
If somebody has the ingenuity to move the engine location and meet the safety requirements and can do it within the current rule set then they should go for it if it's going to make them faster.
And not sure what the constant hang up on "custom sub frames" is.

Yeah, the whole thing was bizarre. You can see I came up on these guys into T6 and just followed them through since the RX7 went under the 350 out of T7. When I saw the contact, it appeared to me that the 350 swerved toward the RX7 after they separated. Not sure what was going to happen with these two, I just decided to follow to avoid getting caught up in any untoward attempted acts of retribution, lol. You can see that I just eased up in 4th and short shifted into 5th as I watched the 350 start to veer off track. I had no intention of trying to squeeze through there and have the 350 bounce off the wall and into our car.

That's pretty interesting. I watched this all happen and your driver left the racing surface and looped the car (right in front of me). I've never seen that happen on a straightaway, but okay. Glad you are fixing the car.

The way I read this thread, and I may be wrong, is that it's a thinly veiled attempt to try and put limits on anybody's ability to increase fuel capacity within the current rule set. It appears to insinuate that the "magic 9" teams are cheating, which is insulting to those teams.
Basically if you aren't racing a Miata or a BMW, then eff off.

Yeah, so the issue is that we have an allowable window of time to use before we push to a 10th stint. It's a balancing act between taking advantage of FCY and our overall race strategy. We know our outside window on fuel and we keep a tight window to avoid adding an erroneous stint later in the race, which may or may not afford us the ability to pit under an FCY.

Before Road Atlanta, we dissected the lap times from the top 5 teams in 2018, generating average lap time per stint, and total average lap time excluding obvious local or FCY reduction and pit stops. Based on that, we determined where we'd need to be on an average lap basis taking into account the additional fuel stops we'd need in a 14-hour race. We hit that average lap time target on 5 out of our first 6 stints. The last three were really maintaining our position and saving the car as much as anything else...especially the final stint.
However, it's worth noting that the pace increased this year. And we didn't count on a 5+ minute black flag penalty. ☹️
While I can see where concurrently tracking lap times during a race might be beneficial (maybe?), the fact is that many teams are going to run as fast as they can until they no longer need to do so. I'm unsure how telling one of our teammates that he was 1.5 seconds off the target once he gets out of the car is helpful. Just IMO.

Nice write up and thanks for posting the video of the test day contact with our 626 and for the props for Crowd Control Racing. Like you, we're sorting through a few things in a relatively new car, and a black flag knocked us back and made us work our way back up. At the end of the race, we were nursing a brake issue so opted to simply hold our solid P3 spot and live to race another day.
You guys have gone through a lot of scrutiny and stuck with it. So good luck at VIR. Our next race it at Daytona and then, perhaps, we'll make the trip to Charlotte for the National Championship.

Transmissions seem to be the most common failure we've seen in three different cars (and yes, with varying drivers).
Our 300Z constantly had trans issues. The KSR 300Z also had regular issues with the Z32 transmission and racing. There are some small parts in those transmissions that fail and take out the entire box.
Our Mazda 626 had a broken shift fork at the Road Atlanta race last year. This is a common failure point with the Mazda G5M trans and the forks are basically an obsolete part.
We just lost 3rd gear in a T5 during testing at Road Atlanta on Friday. I think it's due to user error, lol. That trans had over 40 hours of track/racing time on it. We swapped in the stock OE trans in 31 minutes.